It is with great sadness that I tell you The Starlite Cafe has closed.
The site lived for 25 years and had been a staple in the poetry community.

What happened? Over the years, the site had gradually declined in hits.
The older code base was becoming unstable and more unreliable. A few years ago,
the site suffered a weeklong crash that deleted a fairly large number of poems.

Finally in November 2019, the owner Steve "Poison" announced that the expenses associated
with the site were far exceeding the financial support. He gave all Starliters
over 30 days to save off their poems before the site was decommissioned.

Being a previous owner of the site, I knew that there were a lot of poems in its
archives that people may not have the opportunity to retrieve before the deadline.
Therefore, I made an offer to Steve for the poems, the trademark and domain ownership.
Before the deadline, I was able to export most of the poems (over 800,000) and have
placed them on a new server. They are available for you to read/retrieve/save or delete as you see fit.

It was coincidental that the decommissioning of The Starlite Cafe matched up to one of my
long-term dreams of building a publishing site. So I used the servers for my new
website to host the soon to be deleted poems to give everyone more time to save their
works. Even though the poems are on WritePostPublish.com site, you are under no
obligation to publish anything there. Feel free to access your poems as you did before
with no cost.

For those of you that may be interested in WritePostPublish.com, please allow me to share my vision.
I am seeing this web site as where Starlite meets Publishing. I hope that makes sense.
All writers can still post their material to the site and take advantage of the
environment to interact with friends for comments and to get support. In fact, I intend to extend
this structure to offer the writers an opportunity to work closer with their online friends. We
are looking at bringing back challenges and other mechanism to stir creativity.

There is never an obligation to publish, but it is available to the writers. So feel free to
use the site like another Starlite and continue to grow as writers. If somewhere down the line
you decided to put your material into print. WritePostPublish will have the infrastructure ready for you.
The intent is to allow you to pick from your previously posted material to build the perfect book.
Combine that manuscript with your title, your dedication, your cover, etc. for a gift or for storage
to be sure they don't get lost.

An important point is that WritePostPublish is NOT a typical publishing house. We have no interest
in selling a million copies of your book. If this is your dream, then
this site would not be a good fit. This site is designed to allow customization of a book for a
particular person or group that is tailored just for them. For example, if you wanted
to give a book of love poetry to your significant other or a special book to your mom
for Mother's Day.

When you publish, the electronic manuscript will be sent to our printer. The book will be printed
and sent to the address of your choice. The most exciting thing is that we are targeting the book
to cost no more than 20 dollars

The scope of works is broader for WritePostPublish.com We are accepting all different
types of material, not just poetry. If you want to print a cookbook or a book of sermons
or a book of your life's journey, then the site will allow you to print it without manual
intervention for a low price from the material that you have already posted online.